Honor list of sleeper thrillersby Hec_Currie

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July 30, 2009: Journey to the Far side of the Sun is a rare gem of a movie --it has the essence of a Greek high tragic epic. In its far ranging thrust to the far side of the Sun, it brings to mind the epic reach of Homers The Odyssey. The film's action -- a European space mission beyond the Sun, along with its release in the fall of 1969, coincided with the lunar landing of Neal Armstrong and NASA's Apollo 11 crew. The work is a study in the synchrony/asynchrony, all in search of a balance, equipoise -- akin to the Greek axial age of Pythagoras/Pythagoreans at Delphi, seeking to balance Dionysos' abandon with Apollo's wisdom.

Journey's basic dramatic premise is that a planet mirroring Earth exists on the opposite side of the Sun. This brought to mind the great Greek nature philosopher, Pythagoras, whose cosmic scheme for the 'Kosmos' he both conceived and named, envisaged as did the film, a 'Counter Earth' on the far side of the Sun. Journey's mysterious twin planet on the other side of the Sun, as had Pythagoras counterpoised Earth and Counter Earth to the Earth, both circling about the Sun in his conception of a heliocentric planetary system. This was in contradiction to what Aristotle, some two centuries later erroneously deemed a geocentric universe. Aristotle also took umbrage at Pythagoras' concept of a Counter Earth calling it a "plug" to complete his (Pythagoras) Table of Planetary Spheres so it constituted "the perfect Pythagorean number ten."

All this mythic lore came to mind on seeing Journey once again. On second viewing, it confirmed my memory of the twists and turns in its complex plotline. Throughout the film there is a pattern of 'counter' conventions. Such as, the plot starts with counter espionage, (ferreting out a mole). A counter love interest, (Col. Ross loves his wife, but she doesn't love him). A counter courtship, (rather than the man chasing the woman, the woman chases the man). During the three-week journey pass the Sun, the images all switched from clockwise to counter clockwise, as well as an inversion of light and dark. Each observer will have a different take on the film; such is the rich texture of its allusive images. The two images that had greatest impact on this viewer of director Robert Parrish's Journey were first, the shot of the mirror-image reversal of the film's protagonist, Col. Glenn Ross (Roy Thinnes) and the closing shot of Dr. Hassler, the Eurosec Space Administration exec. in charge of the failed mission (played to the hilt by Patrick Waymark).

A key image: earthling Col. Ross discovered in the 'mirror-reversal' shot of his Counter-Earth 'double' (the films German title being Doppelganger 'Double'), a familiar term in German expressionist films. Col. Ross held up to the mirror a bottle prominently labeled 'COLOGNE'; the viewer reads the reversed lettering in the reflection. A historically contextual aside, could this be a subtle allusion to the destruction of the German city of Cologne, which in 1942 was the target for "the Millennium Raid" of one thousand heavy bombers that pulverized all but the famous Cologne Cathedral? Journey's powerful last image of the now psychologically devastated director of Eurosec's failed mission, immobilized, confined to a wheelchair, wheels down a corridor towards a full length mirror that shatters as he crashes into it. His horror stricken face last caught in grotesque extreme close up, and a quick cut to the mirror's hail of glass shards, talk about a boffo...